International friendships

Having friends visit from across the world is an incredibly exciting thing.  Kids from Spain might never have tried peanut better or bagels - but it turns out they love them!  They speak five languages - fluently! Different and the same - middle school kids are middle school kids.

We are so fortunate to have a partnership with St. Peter's School in Barcelona.  One year they send a dozen students to us to stay with our families and the next year we send students to them.  We get to exchange teachers, too.

Our students revel in visiting a school with a beautiful dining hall and scrumptious prepared food. They walk everywhere in Barcelona - to La Sagrada Familia and other Gaudi sites and they buy fruit and churros at the outdoor market.  They can't believe that dinner starts after 9 PM!

St. Peter's students are amazed at sledding in the snow at Parker, our iconic yellow school buses, and dressing up on Halloween.  Being at a school with woodsy trails and a pond is incredible.  A campfire with roasted marshmallows on a stick and s'mores  - Wow!

Together they go to classes and museums, they sing, create poems and art works - go bowling - and revel in being kids.

From the first year we made new friends from Spain, the entire student body at Parker became more motivated to master the Spanish language.  We ended up extending Spanish to our Preschool and added another session of Spanish to the 4-5 weekly schedule.  For one week a year, everyone plays and works together, getting to know new families and customs and practicing another language. Then it's time to leave.

This week went by so fast - and next year, our turn to visit in Spain, will be here before we know it.

Developing STEMpathy

Disruptive technology surrounds us: self-driving cars, software that writes poetry, drones delivering packages...When machines are competing with people for thinking, what's a human to do?!

Thomas Freidman has been thinking about this, and in his recent article From hands to heads to the hearts he answers that humans have what computers don't - a heart.  He writes that everyone needs STEMpathy to succeed in this new age.

The attributes that can't be programmed are the ones we must develop in school, like passion, character and a collaborative spirit.  It is crucial to combine knowledge with heart to if we want students to thrive in the technical age we live in.

It's a reminder of the importance of Parker's core values and mission, the right ones for our age, or any age.

This morning five alumni from 2008 and 2013 visited for a panel discussion.  Represented were an art teacher and a novelist, a future biochemist, a future biomedical engineer, and a budding labor relations specialist.   Their empathy was evident and the values and advice they espoused were about the importance of being friends with people who want to make you better, building relationships with teachers, and finding activities, clubs and subjects that you feel passionate about.  They are all serious about ideas and value learning over grades.

They loved the fun they had at Parker - playing in the stream and being outdoors.  They valued the friends and teachers.  The thesis project was defining and prepared them for writing everywhere, even in college.   They learned to learn for learning's sake, and felt proud of it.  These young adults were definitely skilled in STEMpathy.

Social pain/social gain

What's harder?  A math problem or a social problem?  This blog post in The Genius in Children answers that social learning is actually the reason for school.  Learning to solve social dilemmas is so important for kids, because in every child's life, friends can be enemies and enemies can be friends, right?

The social waters that children navigate are tricky and the modelling and practice that happen in the immersed social world of school (and camp!) is crucial.  Social pain makes us stronger and fuller people when social skills are part of the curriculum.

I love what author Rick Ackerly suggests: instead of parents asking "How was school today?" they can ask "Solve any social problems today?"  Try this with any age group and you are sure to get into some interesting discussions!

What are kids learning?

What are kids learning in school?  Do we really know?  In his recent article, Most Parents Have No Idea What Their Kids Are Learning In School, Will Richardson, technology and education writer and thinker contemplates what a grade tells him (or not) about what his own children are learning in high school.  He wonders what is sticking with them from their school day that they will use in their lives to become more successful or fulfilled?

I asked this question today in our faculty meeting: How is the culture of the middle school right now? The math teacher piped up immediately, "We had a middle school meeting yesterday - and they are all good!  There are no social issues!"  We all laughed (because middle school life centers around social issues.)  The Health teacher chimed in, "I am talking with the kids about stress in their lives and they said the same thing.  Their friends are not stressors - their parents are! You know - bugging them to see their phones and getting too involved in their lives." Another chuckle from the faculty.

We tend to measure the subject-content of kids' learning - can they add detail to an essay or can they describe the water cycle?  At Parker, we actually do try to measure some of the traits of a successful learner - like the ability to take intellectual risks or work independently, or cooperatively.

But I'm not sure we let parents know the most crucial things, like does their child have a passion to achieve or are they purposeful?  Are they becoming better at negotiating social conflict?  Do they stand up for their beliefs?  Do we let parents know if their kids are measuring up to the school's motto?

Or  - are all of these the wrong things to report to parents because, really, as the kids say, parents are getting just too involved in their lives anyway!

Feeling thankful (for friends, food, and fun!)

Fourth grader Liam R. was thinking about things he was thankful for.  Over the break he typed up his list and shared it today with classmates.

20 Reasons I'm Thankful for Robert C. Parker School

1. Amazing Faculty
2. The amount of good fundraisers
3.  Great friends
4.  Fun clubs, activities and competitions
5.  Awesome summer camps
6.  The great organization
7.  Buddies
8.  Just the fact that there's a pond
9.  Education
10. 70 acres of land
11. The amount of fun!
12. Spaghetti lunches
13. Pizza lunches
14. Pellegrino lunches
15. Nature hikes
16. Studying of continents and countries
17. Good projects
18. Teacher-student interactions
19. Friendships
20. Awesome physics

Celebrating Shakespeare and the Earth

We had an absolute ball on Shakespeare Night.  The  9-day artist-in-residence program with dramatist/clown Sean Fagan and his crew brings every child in the school onto the stage.  Seano works with our teachers and the kids themselves to adapt everything from a song or a storybook, to Macbeth, making a magical evening of theater.  The kids had crazy fun on stage, reveling in language, pratfall, song and plot line - and in each other's successes.

We are all a little tired today, so a buddy hike celebrating Earth Day was just the thing.

What makes you happy?

K-1 teacher Liliana works with the children to create a classroom grounded in peace and friendship.  To see if the children have absorbed the lessons, she asked the kids these questions: "What do you like about school?"  and "What makes you happy?"  Here are some of their responses (categorized after the conversation by Liliana)

Peace and Beauty

• Peace is a wonderful thing at school.  We love people.
• In this classroom there is lots of peace and we make peace a lot.
• We help each other in a kind way.  We get a lot of free choice.
• We meditate.  We go into our silence.
• You can make beautiful pictures.

Play and Friendships

• You can make new friends and play.  We can all play together.
• We play dress-up.
• It's a wonderful class with all these friends.
• Playing games at recess and I help my friends.
• You have really good friends and you help other people.
• We have two recesses.  We can build at recess.  We can build in the classroom and you can mix toys and then when we clean up we put them back where they belong.  If you didn't mix the toys you could not make these structures.

She noted that everyone mentioned the block center as a fun place and recess was also very popular.  They also mentioned all the projects and themes they have worked on: homes and habitats, fall, butterflies, moths, frogs and cooking.

I'm so happy that the culture of our classrooms and school community is infused with these ideas.  Our graduates carry it forth in their personal lives and to work in the peace corps, as doctors, educators, and as entrepreneurs for social causes.  The message of peace and friendship clearly resonates  - and who knows, another Nelson Mandela could be in the making.